>>717660167
>the infamous filter could be bypassed by just sitting in the zone before and maxxing out your equipment
Yes, and it took dozens of hours before they added the store floors which didn't exist until months into release. Getting my Iron to purple tier I think it was took me hours upon hours of farming the lower floors. The only thing you realistically had to work with was upgrading the Iron and ignoring the rest of your equipment because armor took absurd amounts of time to upgrade and you needed four or five pieces on top of the weapon, and every weapon but the iron was pure trash. Actually gaining metal meant running the upwards of 6 floors on repeat, and you needed to be able to consistently beat garbage like JIN-DIE, COEN, or GOTO-9 with certainty.

We also had Fun Fungus so there was no reason to upgrade in the 31-40 range and you could rely on random enemy drops but then you get to COEN or U-10 and instantly die losing all of it so either it's a two hour grind to buy that character back or you deal with the loss.
>the decals were never mandatory to progress to the top floor
No, but a stockpile of fungi were and take a guess what they nerfed almost immediately.
>even then you could just raid others to get a shitload of coins
You did not play this game early on, I guarantee it. Raiding was basically an insta-loss if you tried it, defending was borderline impossible, you constantly had your characters stolen, you lost all your gear if you lost with that character when raiding, and even if you won it was only like 20kish because everyone knew to log off when they had KC.